Nice find! I've owned more TI-99/4As than I can count. Finally managed to pick one up last year which came with the rare Peripheral Expansion Box, which actually cost a LOT more than the computers themselves did. Most people used the 99s as glorified video game consoles, I think.
-Adam

When they closed out the TI-99/4A at the Prange-Way department store in Appleton, Wisconsin there was a huge crowd there to grab them due to an ad in the previous evening's newspaper. They also had a newspaper photographer on a ladder in the store to photograph the crowd when the store opened the morning of the sale. I was include in the picture of the crowd on the front page of that evening's newspaper holding onto a TI computer. Funny what a $99 sale would cause people to do.

A better deal showed up later when a few other stores closed them out in the following weeks, with Shopko selling them for only $29.99.

As someone who has been given access to multiple complete systems and just about any piece of TI branded peripheral and software they made at the time I....just never fell in love with it. Even programming for it seems slightly weird, even if it's just BASIC calls for the speech synthesizer.

In 1982 I paid $1k for one of those and hooked it up to a 12" Zenith B/W portable TV. I managed to write some simple games and a utility program to tune pianos. They actually sold but not enough to cover the cost of the computer, never mind the advertising.

With only 64KB of memory to work with, you learn early to keep out as much bloat as possible when coding!